Behind the scenes at Performance Bicycle

April 14, 2011

Photo Shoot Behind-the-scenes: Welcome to sunny San Diego, CA!

This year for our annual spring photo shoot we traveled to beautiful Southern California for a week of shooting new spring bikes and gear. By now you’ve started to see a lot of this new photography in our spring catalog, in emails, and on our webpage. But we wanted to share a little behind-the-scenes look at what it took to create these images, as shared by Chris, one of our merchandising assistants and erstwhile mountain bike model.

As fate would have it, after scheduling all of the models, the photographer, and booking tickets for ourselves, we flew all the way all across the country, from our home base in North Carolina, only to face the threat of rain. This prompted us to quickly reschedule some of our shoots so that on our first day in California we made our way to a cliff overlooking an amazing vista so that we could start getting some mountain bike shots right away.

Here’s what that same action from the shot above looked like from the photographer’s point of view:

There were four of us being photographed, plus a team of four people on the other side of the camera, including talented photographer Rod Walker.

One thing we had not counted on in this location was the wind. It was almost enough to take us off of our feet! Here are Cathy and myself trying to reload the van, with limited success.

Each shot takes a healthy dose of planning before the photographer snaps a single frame; here’s Bill trying to show us (the riders) where he wanted us to ride. But you can clearly see why we choose this location, it’s simply beautiful!

Here’s TJ and I riding along the line that Bill had picked out for us.

On our way down from that peak, we passed multiple controlled burn locations where the local forestry service was working hard to prevent a big fire. While it looks perfectly safe in this photo, it still made for an exciting drive.

Not wanting to waste any time while we had some sunshine, we drove off of the mountain and straight to downtown San Diego for our urban shoot.

It was a whirlwind tour–we hardly had time to stop to eat before we were prepping new bikes and new models for the next shoot. We got set up just in time and were able to snag some great shots as the sun started to set downtown.

We were blessed with a great group of models, all of which knew how to handle a bicycle (and of course we had a great group of bicycles, all of which knew how to handle a model)!

Day one ended with a couple hundred great shots already in the bag, but with rain on the horizon . . .